DOS PICOS PARK CAN EXERCISE THE BODY AND MIND

Dos Picos Park

Before you go: Download a map and brochure about Dos Picos County Park at the San Diego County Parks page.

Cost: A $3 day-use fee, payable at the entrance.

Rules: Hiking trails are open only to hikers and dogs on leashes.

Trailhead: From state Route 67 heading east into Ramona, turn right onto Mussey Grade Road, following the signs to Dos Picos County Park. After about one mile, turn right onto Dos Picos Park Road and enter the park after about 0.8 mile. To reach the beginning of the nature trail, head to the southwestern end of the campsite area. Or, from the eastern end of the park, begin with the smaller trail above the pond and head up the nature trail from the southwest edge of the pond.

Distance: About 1 mile total.

Difficulty: Easy.

Numbered posts along the main nature trail in Dos Picos County Park are accompanied by a narrative headset. CREDIT: priscilla lister

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Numbered posts along the main nature trail in Dos Picos County Park are accompanied by a narrative headset. CREDIT: priscilla lister

The nature trail in Ramona’s Dos Picos County Park is not only a pretty walk through oaks and boulders, it also offers some education along the way.

There are two short trails in the county park where 75 campsites are also tucked in old oak trees along with a large picnic area with tables and a little pond with lots of ducks.

The trails add up to no more than a mile, but you may wander around them for an hour or two and contemplate the lessons staked out on the main nature trail.

The shortest of the two trails takes off from the parking lot farthest east and winds up above the pond. You can connect to the main nature trail from the south end of the pond just west of its dam.

Before you head out, be sure to ask at the ranger station for a headset with the tiniest iPod to play the narration that accompanies 12 numbered posts along the main nature trail. When you start on the nature trail from that southwest side of the pond, the numbered posts will go from 12 to 1; the beginning of the trail, conversely, is at the westernmost end of the campsites, if you’d rather go from 1 to 12 with the posts.

The numbered posts and narration were an Eagle Scout project by Hunter Owens in 2008.

Post No. 1 asks hikers to stop, close their eyes and listen. Focus your senses on the sounds, smells and movements around you, the speaker says.

Also available to borrow are laminated sheets by the ranger station that point out sights, sounds and “clues.”

If you hear a bird “laughing” at you in a tree, it just may be a redheaded acorn woodpecker. If you hear a sharp sound near the ground that goes, “deek! deek! deek!,” see if you can find a ground squirrel.

If you see a bunch of acorn shells on top of a rock, a bird might have placed them there while knocking them open. If you find a little gray wad of fur and bones, you may have found an owl pellet. “Owls gulp down their food whole and regurgitate what they can’t digest,” it says.

Notice holes in the ground under trees. Snakes don’t dig those holes, but they may go inside them for food or shelter. If the hole is as big as a fat burrito, it was probably made by a ground squirrel; if it’s smaller, like a hot dog, is was probably dug by a gopher.

A numbered post points out the granite formations of the boulders along the trail. “Almost all rocks here are granite formed from molten material deep below the earth’s surface,” the narrator says. Movement of the Earth’s crust has brought them to the surface.

The posts will identify sugar bush, whose berries made a pleasant drink enjoyed by Kumeyaay; scrub oak, whose acorns are a prime food for birds and small mammals; manzanita, Spanish for “little apples,” for the small fruits it bears on its reddish branches; thick-leaved yerba santa with its woolly leaves that were brewed into medicinal cures for ancient people here; lichen, the living algae/fungus on rocks; and the mainstay plants of our local chaparral — California lilac, mountain mahogany, chamise, buckwheat and poison oak.

Dos Picos means “two peaks” in Spanish, derived from two prominent peaks nearby. Though unidentified, I think the two peaks, which you can see from the trail, are Iron Mountain and Mount Woodson. Mount Woodson is especially obvious, covered in boulders with communication towers on top.

The coastal live oak and Engelmann oak trees here make the picnic and camping areas especially inviting; some of them are said to be 300 years old.

But the main attraction is that oak-studded, boulder-strewn trail where views extend to those peaks as well as to Ramona and mountains on the horizon to the east.